Introduction
Health-acquired infections are infections that one gets in a healthcare setup while receiving treatment; this can be caused by treatment procedures or infections from other people in the same facility. Health-acquired infection has drastically increased, especially in facilities where the supply of inputs is well managed, or the healthcare workers are careless. The challenge has led to the health system scheduling training sessions to educate the workers and patients on preventing hospital-acquired infections. The hospital-acquired infections are also referred to as nosocomial infections, meaning ‘hospital acquired’; this type of infection affects patients despite their age, but the most at risk are children and immunosuppressed adults.
Implementation and Evaluation of Quality Improvement
Infection is the primary cause of seeking health care in many facilities as it reduces a person’s productivity by depleting energy in their body. Hospital-acquired infection can affect both the healthcare worker and the client, so the prevention ought to be mutual. The health system should put much effort into preventing nosocomial infections and providing protective gadgets to prevent the spread. The application of safe routines in the facility can help reduce the dissemination of the infection within the facility setup. For a successful project of reducing the spread of infection, the facility is implemented by various stakeholders: the facility manager, nurses, social workers, and the central sterile services department. To reduce infection rates, stakeholders must collect data on how and what causes the spread of infection.
Role of Nurses in Reduction of Hospital-Acquired Infection
Interviewing all the people at risk will provide accurate information critical to the project. Role of Nurses in Reduction of Hospital Acquired Infection. Nurses are active participants in this process; they will describe the occurrence and pathophysiology of the infection. Nurses can contract infection during their provision of care through accidents during surgical procedures or air droplets if they are not in their protective equipment (Surani, 2020). Patients can get the infection during the treatment procedure; for instance, if the instruments are shared from one patient to another, they can also contract the infection from other patients in the facility through coughs, sneezing, and sharing objects. If safety is not observed, the infection can also be transmitted from nurses to patients. Infection in a facility is also caused by the foods and water being consumed in the facility. Contaminated water affects all patients and healthcare workers in the facility, identical to the food provided to the workers, and also the patients can lead to severe infection.
Reducing hospital-acquired infection calls for the collaboration of internal and external stakeholders to achieve the goal (Ng, 2019). After identifying the root cause of a hospital-acquired infection, the responsible stakeholders work closely to eradicate the cause to promote a healthy environment for both healthcare workers and patients. Each team member should play their role intelligently to help achieve the end goal. Nurses are the project’s backbone to reduce hospital-acquired infections; they have a unique role in reducing nosocomial infections to help keep staff and patients safe. Nurses can majorly reduce nosocomial infection by strictly practicing hand hygiene after handling one patient and before attending to the next one, and washing their hands after handling contaminated surfaces and devices in their work environment; this prevents infection of the patients the nurse handles. A nurse’s role is to ensure that the working areas are always sterilized and disinfected regularly, especially before attending to patients; disinfecting trolleys and trenches from one patient to another cuts off the spread of infection from patient to patient.
Practicing safe injection practices is a nursing role in the prevention of hospital-acquired infection, avoiding the sharing of needles and syringes in many patients as this causes infection transmission. Each patient should use their injection objects without sharing them with other patients. Nurses also provide individualized care to different patients at their bedside to help avoid infection in other patients; the nurse is also responsible for ensuring the ward unit is safe from infection (De Waal, 2022). The arrangement of patients’ beds according to their diagnosis also prevents transmission as the highly infected ones are separated from the rest to prevent infection. The safe and immunocompromised patients are also admitted to spaces where there is no risk of contracting infections from other patients. Nurses educate patients in the hospital on measures to prevent infection among themselves and demonstrate hygienic routines like hand washing, avoiding sharing objects in the hospital, bathing, and changing to clean clothes. Putting on gloves and masks also helps nurses prevent hospital-acquired infections; by preventing infection from patients or other staff, infected nurses should follow the proper rules to prevent infection, like staying at home or protecting themselves through hygienic procedures.
Role of Social Workers in Reduction of Hospital-Acquired Infection
Social workers are a part of the project as they manage patients in the facility; changing and cleaning the linens for patients should be done daily. Linens should be changed daily to minimize infections; after the discharge of patients, the social workers should disinfect the bed before admitting another patient in the same bed; this helps in the prevention of infections from one patient to another (Nam et al., 2019). The wards should be dusted and cleaned daily, and all the receivers should be emptied in the right place to make the wards clean and safe from infections. Emptying receivers and safety boxers to help the nurses and doctors have a safe working environment, safety bags should be emptied when they are three-quarters full to avoid accidents. The social care workers should also put up hand washing stations at the entrance of every department in the facility; clean running water and soap should be at the station.
Role of Sterile Service Department Central Sterile Service in Reduction of Hospital Acquired Infection
High-standard sterilization strategies are a key requirement in a facility to promote safe patient treatment procedures. The role of CSSD involves collecting, sorting, cleaning, disinfecting, drying, and assembling instruments; all these steps require the department to be very sensitive with their procedures to avoid any form of contamination that may occur at any stage (Pyatkin et al., 2021)The storage, distribution, and transportation to the procedure station should also be done carefully to prevent contamination. The head of the department should ensure sufficient provision of detergents and all agents and machines needed for sterilization; this helps prevent infection to patients from infected instruments being used on them.
Role of Manager in Reduction of Hospital-Acquired Infection
Managers are also great stakeholders in the project; they make policies on safety measures and provide feedback by identifying and communicating the identified gaps in the facility’s infection prevention strategies (Snyder et al., 2020). Leaders coach the workers on the set policies and strategies to help achieve a safe environment. The managers also participate in ensuring the supply of protective equipment in the facility.
Conclusion
Finally, infection prevention is the primary goal of many facilities; when all the set policies are adhered to, the infection burden will be minimized. The cost of treatment for the patients will be eliminated, making the hospital stays short. Thus, All the departments should work together to create a healthy working environment for all the healthcare workers.
References
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Nam, S. I., Choi, K., & Kim, J. (2019). Role changes of hospital social workers in South Korea. Social Work in Health Care, 58(7), 703–717. https://doi.org/10.1080/00981389.2019.1625845
Ng, D. (2019). Should all stakeholders be treated fairly? Identifying stakeholders that legitimately matter. Organization Management Journal, 16(4), 298–310. https://doi.org/10.1080/15416518.2019.1679079
Pyatkin, V., Roit, P., Michael, J., Goldberg, Y., Tsarfaty, R., & Dagan, I. (2021). Asking it all: Generating contextualized questions for any semantic role. Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.108
Snyder, R., White, K., Glowicz, J., Novosad, S., Soda, E., Kuhar, D., & Sinkowitz-Cochran, R. (2020). Targeted assessment for prevention facility assessments: The most common CAUTI and CLABSI infection prevention gaps. Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology, 41(S1), s4-s5. https://doi.org/10.1017/ice.2020.475
Surani, S. (2020). Introductory chapter: Hospital-acquired infection and legionnaires’ disease. Hospital Acquired Infection and Legionnaires’ Disease. https://doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.91373
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